The Cold WarA New History

Author: John Lewis Gaddis

The Penguin Press

According to Gaddis, Stalin believed that the "the disproportionate
burden the Red Army had borne in
defeating Hitler gave the U.S.S.R. a moral claim to substantial,
perhaps even preponderant, influence in shaping the postwar
settlement." Stalin,
Gaddis writes,
wanted "security
for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely
that order." Stalin wanted territorial concessions at the
expense of Iran and Turkey, naval bases in the Mediterranean
and to punish Germany through military occupation, property
expropriations, reparations payments, and he was looking forward
to transforming Germans ideologically. "All of Germany must
be ours, that is, Soviet, communist," he commented in 1946.
To achieve his objectives he wanted to maintain the goodwill
of the British and United States. He wanted neither a cold nor
hot war. Clinging to his Marxist perspective, he believed that
another economic crisis would eventually arise among the capitalist
powers and that it would produce conflict between capitalist
powers. "The inevitability of wars between
capitalist
countries remains in force," he insisted, as late as 1952.
This, he believed would bring more people to Marxist-Leninist
socialism as an alternative. It would not be necessary to confront
the Americans and British directly in order to advance his brand
of socialism.
He saw disgusted Europeans embracing communism as an alternative.
Meanwhile he would continue speaking with hostility toward the
capitalist West in order to keep the people of the Soviet Union
loyal to his rule and way of looking at the world.

Despite the brutality that the Soviet Union inflicted upon the Germans at
the end of the war, Stalin was under the illusion that the regime he
installed in his zone in Germany would win the hearts and minds of enough
Germans that the whole of Germany would turn communist. Stalin had not
expected the success of communist revolution in China. There is no
evidence that Stalin had a
long-term strategy in Asia, writes Gaddis, but Stalin was quick
to see opportunities in Mao's success and to seek ways in which he might use the
Chinese without doing irreparable damage to his relations with the West. Stalin
proposed to Mao a "second front" against the capitalist west. Also Stalin
gave a "green light" to Kim Il-sung to invade South Korea,
and he encouraged Ho Chi Minh to
intensify his offensive against the French in Indochina. This, of course, did
not turn Mao or Ho Chi Minh into Stalin's puppets. Graddis writes of various
powers during the Cold War as seeking support from either the United States
or the Soviet Union for their own purposes rather than as puppets of either.

Rather than the crisis for capitalism that Stalin expected, by the time of
his death in 1953 a new age of prosperity had begun. Writes Gaddis:

World manufacturing output quadrupled between the
early 1950s and early 1970s. Trade in manufactured products increased by a factor
of ten. Food production rose faster than population growth. Consumer goods once
considered luxuries – automobiles, refrigerators, telephones, radios,
televisions,
washing machines – became standard equipment.

Gaddis draws these economic observations from Britain's Marxist
historian, Eric Hobsbawm, and Graddis writes: "Of course much of humanity
remained poor," Hobsbawm acknowledged, "but in the old heartlands of
industrial labor what meaning could the [communist} international's 'Arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers' have for workers who now
expected to have their car and spend their annual paid vacation on the
beaches of Spain?"

On the other hand, by 1971 the economies of the Soviet Union and its East
European satellites were stagnating. By 1981 living standards in the Soviet
Union had deteriorated to such an extent that life expectancy was declining.
Opinion, as Stalin had hoped, was to decide the issue of capitalism versus
his brand of socialism, but opinion worked against his brand of socialism – and against the Soviet Union
itself.